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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Review: Small Talk:Learning From My Children About What Matters Most by:Amy Julia Becker

About the Book:Almost
every day, one of Amy Julia's children says something or asks something
that prompts her to think more carefully: What lasting mean? William
wonders when he hears a song about God being an everlasting God. "If the
children who died went to heaven, then why are we sad? Penny asks, when
she passes by a funeral for a victim of the Sandy Hook shootings. "I
don't wanna' get 'tized!" says Marilee about baptism. These
conversations deepen her relationships with her children, but they also
deepen and refine her own understanding of what she believes, why she
believes it, and what she hopes to pass along to the next generation.

Small
Talk is a narrative based upon these conversations. It is not a
parenting guide. It does not offer prescriptive lessons about how to
talk with children. Rather, it tells stories based upon the questions
and statements Amy Julia s children have made about the things that make
life good (such as love, kindness, beauty, laughter, and friendship),
the things that make life hard (such as death, failure, and tragedy),
and what we believe (such as prayer, God, and miracles).
About the Author:AMY JULIA BECKERwrites about faith, family, and disability for Parents.com, theNew York TimesMotherlode blog, TheAtlantic.com,The Huffington Postparents page, and inChristianity Today,The Christian Century, and numerous other publications. Her first book,A Good and Perfect Gift: Faith, Expectations, and a Little Girl Named Penny, was named one of the "Top Ten Religion Books of 2011" byPublishers Weekly. Amy Julia lives in western Connecticut with her husband and three children.

My Review:
This book is a really good one to get as a parent especially if you never think about these things or your never have these type of conversations with your children. I know for my husband and I, we have shared these type of conversations with our children many times. And it is gripping sometimes. My son watched the movie 2012 and because of this movie it changed his perspective on the return of the Lord.

He was so scared every time he seen a crack in the road that this meant Jesus was about to return. And it caused him to search himself and know that he wasn't saved. As a result of many conversations relating to this he asked us to help him say the sinners prayer. He is saved today and has been baptized.

In our family, we really try to pay attention to these little conversations because no matter how trivial they may sound, they are thoughts that mean a lot to our children. And because of that it should mean the world to us. We could see that our son was deeply troubled by this so we tried to help him the best we could and after he asked Jesus to come into his heart, it never scared him again like it did when this all started.

As the author uses the conversations with her children and the things that she herself has learned along the way. I pause and reflect on my own "little" conversations with my children and it makes me smile. They are brought up in a home that causes them to look to God in every situation, good or bad. We tend to show them that we need to look for the lesson in each situation that God may be trying to teach. And as we all know if we look really hard, we can find it every time.

The chapter on waiting spoke volumes to me but as a "veteran" mother, I have come to realize some of these resolutes already. But out of the entire book, this was my favorite chapter. I think with time and growing older, I have learned to be more patient. But as we all know from time to time we still have a lot more to learn.

If you would like to learn more about this book, you can at this link.

**Disclosure** This book was sent to me free of charge for my honest review from the Z Blog Squad.